003 Maximum speed

I'm here with my co-host Rob Malcerry. I'm going to talk about speed today.

“So this is the third in a mini series of topics that we've been starting with for our podcast.”

We started with the mix of concepts of strength, speed and power. We then taught last week about maximum strength and the mechanisms or the adaptions that go into developing that. And now this week we're going to talk about speed and the adaptions that contribute to improving that quality. So essentially I'm going to run through the adaptions one by one. And after each adaption after I've described it I'll throw the

ball out to Rob and he can talk a little bit about the ways that he is programming at the moment for actually targeting those specific adaptions. And just to repeat something that I've said in the beginning and also last week what we're talking about here is speed. Improving speed is improving a specific external outcome, a measurable external outcome. We're actually watching the athlete get faster. Their maximum speed is now greater. That speed is not itself an adaption. The speed

that we're trying to improve the improvement in speed is caused by changes inside the body or

“inside the central nervous system. So that means that there is no unique stimulus that increases”

speed. There are unique stimuli that improve or create each individual adaption. And we have to know exactly what those individual adaptions are and what those stimuli are in order to program properly to make those adaptions happen. So starting at the beginning we've got something very similar to what we start with with maximum strength last week which is an improvement in coordination. So when we improve coordination we are essentially upgrading our existing motor program for a particular

movement. We're getting more efficient at it and that is allowing us to achieve great performances in that movement. Whether it's producing a higher maximum strength or it's moving faster, efficiency is going to benefit us whether it's maximum strength or speed. However, when we do talk about improvement in speed as a result of a upgrade in our coordination that is still a velocities specific phenomenon. We can't practice a movement that we want to get faster out slowly.

So for example, we think you might have vertical jump. We can't do heavy back squats and expect that to improve our coordination in a vertical jump. That has actually been modeled in the exercise literature and it was shown that you can't really do that. It just doesn't

happen. So ultimately what we're looking at here is a stimulus which is practicing a movement

very, very fast that are as fast as we possibly can in order to improve our efficiency in that very fast movement. And obviously we need that that high speed to generate that particular effect. So there are a couple of things that I just mentioned briefly for our paso to rob. We can obviously think of things that do make a difference. We can obviously with it being a motor program. We can focus on the practice element of that. So practicing obviously works by deliberate repetition of a

high quality movement. So we want to be, I get in good feedback. We want to be maybe even taking videos of ourselves to improve the movement. But also we want to avoid anything that's kind of slowing us down. So I want to avoid any fatigue accumulating. A lot of people often ask me and my questions, you know, if I see myself slowing down over a series of repetitions or a

“series of sets and I'm aiming for improvements in speed, you know, is that going to be problematic?”

Well, it is going to kind of stop you from maximizing your coordination gains if you're trying to coordinate a very fast movement because you're no longer moving as fast as you would do if you're moving, you know, at the fastest possible speed. So it would see a negative effect of fatigue. Of course, conversely, anything that really helps, you know, kind of maximise performance, like an external focus or, you know, experiencing a little bit more autonomy in the situation

you're working in, those are going to be great as well. So that's physiologically what's going on for improving coordination. Rob, tell us a little bit about how you might improve coordination in these kind of situations. Yeah, of course, Chris. So I mean, we mentioned a lot of it in the maximum strength for one last week and it's really fairly similar. Well, when you think of coordination and fast movements, obviously programming that, you want to make sure that you're

velocity specific. So I personally say, you're not going to improve coordination in a heavy back squat and have that coordination that are transferred to the vertical jump. So when you're trying to improve that coordination, a few things programming wise, you can implement pretty easily.

First one, and I have one that's probably familiar with, it's just reps for reserve. So if you're

really trying to improve speed, obviously staying, you know, just miles away from failure is usually going to be beneficial. But the closer you get to failure, you start getting some negative things happening. Sometimes if you get a two failure, you get some things we'll talk about later with fiber type shifting and that. But yeah, just keeping like three, four reps from reserve, probably at least on average is what I tend to do. I'm some great product dollars. You can use

there. Also, like cluster sets, things like that. You know, making sure your boss speeds are good. You can use velocity based training. There's plenty of apps these days. Use the few of them. You can Google different ones and use whatever you like. Well, you can kind of cap sets at a certain

Travis Mash and some other guys. I love to use velocity based training. Some of the guys at booky strength. I want to use the train there back in the day in Oregon. We're really in big on that for a lot of their pilotors for managing fatigue and things like that. So yeah, you just avoid all that fatigue, keeping reps reserve, using clusters, using VBT. And then that way you can ensure that you're actually able to make those coordination improvements in the movement

that you're training. Just trying to go as fast as possible. Because otherwise, you don't get those improvements up those high velocities. As soon as you start again fatigue in that, you just start missing out on those gains. Yeah. Fantastic. But those are still relatively still moderate velocities out there. I mean, we're still, you're still describing situation where you're using relatively heavy loads or moderate loads. Do you see,

“do you do anything more at the top end of the velocity space? I mean, are you going to slow?”

Like jumps and throws and things like that. Yeah, of course. So besides managing fatigue and things like that with the heavy loading and those things, obviously, that is more towards a four-cent of that force for acid approach. So that's using a lot of unloaded training, jump training, sometimes it's like very like throwing in that. And then, you know, you can even use like overspeed stuff with bands, some overspeed jumps and things like that. I really like those a lot. And we'll

get into a more depth on another chapter. Yeah, absolutely. That's absolutely. Can help with improving your, you know, regular counter movement jumping that as well, finding a bit more optimal depth, be keeping all those unloaded movements in a program at the beginning when you're fresh, or it's really really well, again, you want to avoid that fatigue. And it'll place the

later on. There's always that idea with support stuff that you can like learn to train and stay

stronger and faster under fatigue. And it just doesn't work at all in practice. You just don't make those improvements. You know, get the coordination improvements. You don't get the improvements. And some of the things that we'll chat about later on today. Yeah, absolutely. One of the interesting things. Sorry. I was just going to add some of the other practitioners spoken to have actually completely moved away from the idea of sets when it comes to the high velocity under the spectrum.

Because we're already, as you described, when you're, you know, talking us through the the heavier end of the spectrum and just trying to keep speed high in those situations. And then when we talked, talked about the light under the spectrum and the fastest movements. Obviously, where miles away from failure at this point, no matter what we do. So some of the other practitioners that I've been talking to have moved away from this idea of sets. And

it's just like we're focusing on individual repetitions. Because we already know that the

fastest and most well coordinated repetition is the first one. Or maybe it might be the second

“of the third one depending on your situation. I mean, you have to kind of, if you actually”

is really interesting to measure bar speeds and watch. Because there are some situations where, I mean, I know, for a fact that when I, if I do a series of a couple of vertical jumps, my third is usually the highest, but you can kind of, sort of, it depends on the person's skill level and experience and practice and all that kind of thing. I think the more well-practiced athletes are, the earlier they tend to hit their maximum kind of performances in those kind of

situations, those unloaded situations. That's my personal kind of belief. It doesn't necessarily happen in the world. Yeah. And now we're good to mention that it's now like so volume dependent. But yeah, it's almost like it's not a set on a rep thing anymore. It's like we're no longer trapping ourselves into this mentality of going, we have to do sets and reps. Because the reality is the stimulus is not in any way shape or form related to any kind of fatigue or progress through

a set. You do a couple of repetitions. It's like, well, the reality is it might be the first

one or two that made the difference. And after that, you drop below your original kind of max velocity threshold and you now in the situation where you're not getting much of an imprint. Because the stimulus for creating something like coordination improvement is actually showing the brain something better than it already has. I mean, that's my favorite way of describing it. So if you've kind of done the first couple of reps and you now start into experience, that fatigue that you

described. And so you start to drop below your previous best performances. Well, the brain's

“going to look at that and go, well, why would I do anything with this information? How does it help me?”

I mean, I actually had a better one that I did earlier. So I'm just going to kind of keep that and not bother with any of this new information that you're giving me. And I think that's kind of why people are going to go and, well, you know, we just kind of track the bar speed over course of a couple of reps or even plus the type situation where you're doing intra repetition rest. Maybe just do the repetition, gather yourself, take five, ten seconds, do another repetition. And we just

keep measuring the speed and as the speed drops. Like, stop, okay, we'll take five, do something different. Come back, maybe try again. Or maybe not. Because, and this is an interesting question. So, you know, practice does require repetition. But what I think people miss is that bad repetition is no good. It actually doesn't do anything. So we're better off striving for those, you know, small numbers of optimal perfect, best possible repetitions in this situation. And

or if they're getting feedback or if they're trying to develop an understanding of what problems

“might be the case, fine. I mean, do whatever repetitions you need to do. But I'm like, of course,”

you know, the fatigue will start to change the way the movements performed. And then you kind of try to fix something. There's not a problem, you know, or not a problem under under the circumstances. So I think this is one of those areas. And I was kind of just curious to see, you know, where you

are going at the moment in this respect. But ultimately, I think, you know, this is more for

kind of coaches who are trying to improve a an athletic movement. You know, maybe you're working, you know, with pictures, for example, and actually specifically try to improve. I've got some really cool people we could bring on and talk about that actually. I'm really, really fun to get that view point. But, you know, just sort of trying to understand how coordination can be, you know, sort of improved specifically as an adoption. That's hopefully illustrative for people listening, you know, how

coordination works and how we might go about thinking, you know, in terms of training programs. So antagonist characterizations are next mechanism. And this really has so much in common with

“coordination that I almost, you know, I have a lot of sympathy with people who just group this together.”

And go, oh, it's all, it's all intermuscular coordination. And I will nearly, because we do see a little bit more transferability within intermuscular with with antagonist characterizations. So it kind of separates out a little bit from from coordination and makes it so it's harder to just call it all intermuscular coordination. I don't think it really is. But antagonist characterization doesn't improve pretty rapidly during fast movement training programs. And it does seem to have a

little bit of transferability away from the actual movement that was done in training. But the issue is that all of the stuff that we, all of the stuff that improves coordination also tends to improve antagonist characterizations. So anytime we're programming to improve coordination, we're going to see exactly the same benefits on the antagonist coordination side. Just, you know, probably, let me try a very specific with what I say here. The adoption probably occurs more quickly as regards,

you know, comparing it with something, sorry, the antagonist characterization adoption probably occurs more quickly when comparing it with maximum strength training, whether the antagonist characterization change occurs very, very slowly. But that doesn't mean necessarily that it's going to compete with coordination improvements. You know, coordination improvements seem to be kind of like, you know, instantaneous. And they seem to improve very dramatically in a short period of time. So I

wouldn't want to say that just because the antagonist characterization changes bigger in the case of, you know, in the case of fast movement training. I wouldn't want to say that suddenly

it's now something we need to obsess about, you know, it kind of still probably plays second

fit-up to coordination improvements. And it pretty much seems to develop an exactly the same way. So, Rob, I'm guessing you're going to give me the same answer that you gave me last time, which is that, yeah, you just treat it in the same way as coordination. Yeah, I just kind of like, grow along with the movement for a long period of time, let it write out. And then just, you know, make sure, you know, you said the practice is quality,

the repetitions are quality. And then you're not doing things with worse technique, slower speeds and stuff like that. They have such that. Another really fancy with that one. No, sure. That I just want to pick up one of that thing that you just said there,

“though the running movements for a long period of time. Because I think in S&C, especially in”

athletic context, there is a strong tendency for people to rotate movements a lot. And to do, yeah, do a couple of weeks, kind of a block of particular triangle. And then when they notice that the movement is not like improving, they switch to another movement. And that kind of, obviously, then displays very similar improvements and faster improvements. And they would have got if this took with the same move. And I think that gives this false sense of kind of progress. Because

ultimately, I think most of the time what we're doing when we do that is simply getting, you know, a coordination improvement and an antagonist characterization reduction that really kind of isn't massively transferable. Unless you're, you know, trying to improve that particular movement, I mean. Yeah. But then you just switch all the time and you get that coordination in and over and over and over and over. Exactly. Massive practice affects water.

And I think it hides a lot of errors in programming. I think it means that a lot of coaches, you know, whether they're doing it deliberately or accidentally, can kind of disguise mistakes that they might otherwise be making in their programs that are causing athletes not to make as fast progress as they perhaps could be doing. You know. And ultimately, it's,

it's like it, it creates a lack of honesty in the, in the feedback process. Because if we're always

using a, you know, kind of a set of exercises, or at least a set of Marker exercises. If we're going to rotate some stuff, we just keep some Marker exercises in the program. If we can get those Marker exercises continuously moving up, then that creates an honest feedback loop. And you know, makes us confident that we're actually making progress. And I guess when we're talking about speed and separate concept from strength, we should make sure that we always have, you know,

Marker exercises for both ends of the force for losty spectrum. So, you know, really cool to have say, you know, some kind of heavy lift as our strength marker and some kind of jump, you know,

be something I think it's useful to add a based on what you said. So let's move on to some of the

“more interesting stuff. So when it comes to speed, we've got multiple options. We've mentioned”

the coordination and the antagonist characterization. Let's now move on to about protein at the crewment. So the cool thing about protein at crewment is it doesn't care how fast we're moving in, you know, what just to relate the effect. We literally just need a maximum level of central mode to command. So as long as we don't have any, you know, discomforting sensations, as long as we're properly motivated, we should be able to hit maximum levels of central mode, and in

pretty much any concentric, straight shortening cycle or isometric movement. The eccentric

susceptible problem, but as we always say, we'll talk about that in a separate episode. We're going

to get absolutely paned for the keep just keep saying that all the time. We're going to talk about that in the future. Anyway, so we are going to talk about that in the future, but for today, you know, routine of crewment improvements massively transferable, such a cool adaption. It doesn't care even what joint you're using. If it's a due joint muscle, I'd love that study. So that before, it shows that you train the rectum, as a hip flexor or as a knee extent, so that it doesn't matter,

you're still going to get voluntary activation increases in that muscle at either joint after training. So very, very cool adaption. It seems to be muscle specific. In the case of strength training, you know, perhaps in the case of static stretching, it might be a global phenomenon when we see recruitment increase, but that wouldn't be through this mechanism because obviously there's no recruitment in the case of a static stretch. So the mechanism by which achieving a high level of

recruitment triggers an increase in our ability to act as high threshold motor units seems to be simply sending the highest possible stomach and to that muscle. And obviously there's so many things that impact on that, but Rob, tell us a little bit about how you think about improving recruitment, whether it's for maximum strength law speed, because it doesn't matter at this point. Yeah,

what methods are you using at the moment? Yeah, I always like you said this one's a much more

interesting one, because I think a lot of people don't realize when you're trying to get faster when you improve recruitment, and you gain access to more motor units and more higher threshold muscle fibers, they're going to automatically be faster than when you previously had access to. So it's a really cool one, and I did mention some of the things I like to do last time. The isometrics were a big one. So the example, you know, we talked a little bit about like

sprinters trying to improve hip flexor concentric velocities in that. So you can use,

“I might say that's what direct them would be a good one, and a lot of times I'll use that.”

If I have access to like a good seat at like extension machine, I can use that, but like you said, you don't have to use, and you can use kind of higher end of that muscle that you're trying to train, and it'll still be transferable. So if they don't have one, and a lot of people don't, then I'll use something that I mentioned last time that like kneeling hip flexor isometric, just driving your knee into the bottom of the bench, works really well, and then yeah, you can still

get those recruitment gains in that rectum and the hip flexors without having, you know, needing access to like extension, something like that. In terms of like increasing recruitment as well, obviously heavy strength training. So this is where heavy strength training would do a really good job, well reps, heavy loads, still staying, you know, sharp failures that you don't cause those fiber type shifts in that. We'll mention in a minute, but you know, people try to, they try to

say that heavy strength training is automatically going to make you slower, going to make you worse, as an athlete. And in those cases, you know, hypertrophy from heavy strength training is going to be beneficial up to a point. You get to add a lot of muscle as an actual guy from the most part to really make you slower. And the gains in, you know, force production and the gains in recruitment from the heavy strength training are going to be really good and really transferable. And like you said,

that is not just, you know, you don't just squat or leg extension or chest press and increase recruitment in those muscles and then not have a do anything. It transfers directly regardless of the speed, regardless of the movement. So yeah, really really cool. Well, yeah. So just to reiterate, the main ones, heavy strength training is a metrics work really well. And then you did imagine briefly static stretching. So I mean, just to get a little into that, as I used to be a

gymnast, we did tons and tons of static stretching and, you know, very likely works through increasing pain tolerance and increasing ability to access more muscle fibers and more motivated

that that way. But I've never found that, you know, people that do a lot of flexibility training

in that generally, you know, maybe it's just my own experience, more athletic, stronger, just better athletes overall. So much of a big, big fan of static stretching, even though people

“do try to crop on it a bit in the industry still. I think I should never forget the”

anecdotes that you told me about your experiences as a gymnast. Actually, I mean, the pain, the pain tolerance thing definitely comes out when you tell those anecdotes is definitely effective that this pretty old piece from the beginning. Yeah, and you can't do a split. So it comes since on your back and screams in your ear until you find a good ground. And it was definitely not the most fun thing in the world. These days, maybe I appreciate it. But not so much. It's really

interesting to know how these two types of training are completely different because, obviously,

a high level of recruitment. The brain recognises that and then allows us to move higher for the

same effort perception. It's like strength training is not working by the same mechanism that static stretching is working. So because we know that because if you do like low strength training to feel that you still hit maximum tolerable perceptions of effort, but that doesn't actually

“create an increasing recruitment. The only way to create an increasing improvement is to actually hit”

a maximum level of recruitment itself. And then what I think is happening is the brain is downgrading that kind of perception of effort from the central mode to command signal allowing us to the next time achieve a higher level of motion for the same perception of effort. Or you're describing with touch stretching very eloquently is that I think that it's a fantastic. It's a really, really illustrates just how static stretching is working to actually create an increasing motion

and the reason I say it's global is that we get across over effect. So if you do a static stretching

programme we're just one part of the body, you tend to see strength increases in other parts of the body as well. And that's, you know, there's no possible mechanism that that can be explained by except through motin recruitment increases at the total global whereas strength training is very much more specific. And I want to go back to something that you said a couple of moments ago at the beginning of your explanation of the things that you're doing with isometrics because

and I'm interested in just exploring this because when we look at the hip flexor complex, the hip flexor complex obviously has as the rectus femoris is being the primary hip flexor through to approximately 60 degrees of hip flexor range and motion. So starting the stunning position is you start to raise your leg that's mostly the rect fem. And you go past that it switches to the so us and some other muscles as well. Now the really thing, really interesting thing about that then is that

if we want to increase recruitment for hip flexion, so I'm specifying this here because when I've mentioned that recruitment is muscle specific, it's really important to remember that is muscle specific, not joint specific. If we're trying to improve and the same thing would apply for the hip extensors, if we wanted to improve hip extension, routine recruitment levels for sprinting so we're looking to improve maximum torque but also maximum velocities in those

muscles that are working as hip extensors. You know, we would need three separate parts of range and motion. We need the full hip extension for glute max. We need some more on 45 for the for the hamstrings. We need some more around 90 plus for the doctor Magnus. Now the same thing would apply to the hip flexors. So if we're trying to increase recruitment using these asymmetrics,

“it would be really cool to do multiple kind of joint angles, at least two, I think, you know,”

maybe one a zero and one sort of 75 to 90 wherever's comfortable. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, I mean, we have been programming them for just, you know, rug them in mind. The obviously you can program them. Do just one set, you know, one match everyone had each short angle to get more of the overall hip flexor complex. Yeah, because I mean, obviously if the athletes moving into those higher ranges of motion is because, of course,

you know, even though eccentric contractions do work a little bit differently. Having the ability to accelerate still in part depends on routine recruitment levels. So it would be interesting to see, you know, whether asymmetrics in more stretch positions could be really quite valuable. If the if the joint angle range of motion requires different muscles in different parts of the range of motion, you know, obviously it's irrelevant for the quads, because it's like, yeah, the quads doesn't care

what joint angle it is. Whereas for the hips, it actually is quite a big deal, both

a four flexion and four extension. Now that's really interesting. I'd never made that connection

in my mind, but as you were describing the exercises that the asymmetrics that you were programming, I thought actually, you know, yes, the rectum is the primary one that I'll be interested in for sprinting. But, you know, the other end of the range of motion could actually be pretty cool. And it's a great thing about asymmetrics is that you're not talking about doing a lot of them, and they don't take a lot of space in the workout. It's relatively easy to do. Very cool.

We've got greens going to warm up, it's like, and the easiest way to do it, it takes you like, a minute. Totally. And that is just such a good reminder, the idea of having separate speed and strength sessions just doesn't make sense physiologically, because, you know, why don't you just do your speed work as your warm-up for your strength workout? I mean, for me, that just seems such an obvious thing to do. Historically, people have been like, no, I am training for speed today.

“And I think that goes back to this idea that speed is a thing, strength is a thing.”

And it's like, no, the adaptions are the things. These are just the outcomes that we measure. If we're doing some asymmetrics for maximum amount of crewment improvement, and that actually takes us in two different directions and gets us both strength and speed gains. Oh, am I doing a strength workout? Or am I doing a speed workout? Or am I doing a warm-up? I mean, does it matter? You know, labels and terminologies that people give these things,

it's cease to really kind of make sense anymore, because now we're focusing on the adaptions.

Okay, cool. So, the fourth and final central nervous system adoption that we see happening after

fast movement training is an increase in motor unit firing rates. This is something that's just super specific to fast movements. It doesn't happen after heavy strength training. And it doesn't really benefit slow movements, even high force, high effort slow movements. I need, you know, it cannot only really benefit fast kind of situations. It's again probably not movement specific at all.

It's probably exclusively muscle specific in the same way that motinute crewment, because it is connected to motinute crewment, so it's probably super useful super-transferable and very valuable in that respect. So, this is probably the, well, we'll talk about the other one at a moment, but this is probably the one that the adaption that I'm thinking of when somebody

says, "Why should I do fast movements in the gym when I'm already doing fast movements in sport?"

That's, this is for me, that's kind of, this is the adaption that answers that question.

“So, are you, are you kind of doing this again in warm-up to prior to strength training sessions?”

Yeah, I mean, I kind of would just throw this into the category of things I'm targeting with warm-ups. You know, if I'm working for, like, to say, as fast a movement velocity is possible, and I want maybe a little more, like, need dominant, you know, then I would do like a vertical jump with, say, you know, PVC pipe on the back or something like that. If I wanted to be a little more hip dominant, I'm still as fast as possible, you know, just added

more arm swing, things like that. So, you can change when you want to target a little bit that way. Yeah, I mean, the biggest one with that is just making sure that people are going as fast as they

possibly can. Again, avoiding fatigue, avoiding all those things, we're going to make you slower.

I don't really have it targeted specifically just on its own. It's kind of wrapped in with, you know, the other parts of the warm-up and things like that. It doesn't take any extra time, either. Hi, uh, yep. Not really a toned program was that I focused all that on, but there's, I mean, there's so many things to make sure you just don't do with it. And, you know, we just mentioned

“so many of them, so many people trying to do tons of volume, so many people supporting”

obsessions. You don't have these training work out and you go over board and then you sprint the next day or you jump the next day. And all of a sudden, you don't hit that absolute max velocity. And you don't get that improvement. And then you really just waste that that session. So yeah, just make sure, you know, programming wise, you're splitting things up appropriately or if it's better, just not split in them. Like you said, start in the session with the speed work. I mean,

even if you do sprint work and things like that, very briefly at the beginning of a session, if you don't do a lot of it, it's not. Obviously it's going to impact your heavy strength training. But if you do the sprint work in that, obviously afterwards or even the next day, you can have a very negative impact and not go very fast. So yeah, more about just being mindful of those things, I would say to actually have those fast firing rates. And then I would also say,

you didn't mention it, but people still think that like motor unit firing rates are an important thing and heavy strength training. I hear that all the time. I've even seen it in boats and textbooks. And it just, it doesn't do anything for the heavy strength event of things. Nothing at all. It doesn't increase like you said, after heavy strength training, because it's not an adaption that's necessary for it. So yeah, just don't think you're going to be getting it from that at all.

Even if you have that maximum of 10, like people like to say, and just know that you actually have to make sure you're going as fast as possible, jumping as high as possible. And you know, like you said, you can measure and track those super easily with the absolute anything. And then just keep on tap here. Absolutely. And this ties in really well with what I've been so trying to get people to consider the last couple of months, which is there for a lot of

athlete, for a lot of athletic context, for a lot of athletes doing two really high quality strength training

“sessions a week and treating the warm-up seriously. So I think that's the key element here.”

It's like, if you go into the warm-up, like, this is not just a warm-up. This is my speed training for this athlete. Then suddenly now your vertical jumps are no longer just going to do some jumps and get really, it's like, you know, we're going to track the speed on these. We're going to try and get a really high jump as measure it and write it down in the spreadsheet. You know, and that's that warm-up now has not just been a kind of walk-through just to kind of take a box.

It's like we're treating that warm-up seriously, to get some speed adaptions from moving really fast. And then we're going into the heavy strength training session. And then we're going to not then do a whole load of other useless stuff and mess around. And we're going to wait a couple of days, come back and do another really high quality session where, again, we get these adaptions to me later for both speed and strength. And that looks like you look at them on

the interesting thing is, when you write that down in a piece of paper, it's like a couple of jumps and then there's nothing there. It's like people go, yeah, but when I write down that the athlete's going to do like three to five count of movement jumps for height, that means that I'm going to write the number down. I'm going to be encouraged them to jump as far as the possible we can. We're going to treat that really seriously. You know, similar to if we do

improve jump for distance, I'm like, I want to know these numbers and I want to make sure

I'm like, what's that? What was that? Is that an effort? You know, it's like, I want to see movement

“happening over time. So I want to see changes. We're doing this to track that the speed training”

is working. And the same way that we're looking at weight going up over time or reps going up over time in the strength training part of the workout. So it looked at on paper, saw a couple of jumps, couple of this, couple of that. And then we're going to have his strength training. Oh, you know, you're doing two or three sets of this and two or three sets of that. And like this isn't so unlike it is, it's going to work really well. Why are we doing it? We're going to do it with

intent. And you know, we know exactly why it's going to work. We're not messing around doing 40 different things. And then coming back in the next day and doing another 40 different things. And the athlete spends the entire week in a tea state, the kind of

coordination sport, the kind of improvement or anything else that they try to improve in the

strength training context. It's like, we're not, there's a difference between doing a target to work out to achieve goals and just kind of entertaining ourselves exercising. You know,

“I think that's the turns of the spectrum. You know, I think a lot of essence he programs are”

leaning more towards the entertaining themselves doing a lot of exercising rather than the targeted, let's get stuff done to trigger specific adaptions that, you know, I think a lot of people look at the program and go, that's not enough. Like, no, it really is. They just want something so complex and novel all the time. And that usually means it's significant or worse. And they're chasing feeling tired or feeling like they've worked hard and like we need to work,

smart and see improvements happening over time. That's everything. Nothing else really matters. So there we go. So the final adoption then is an improvement in muscle fibres shortening velocity. This is a very cool adoption that happens irrespective of muscle fibres type. So we see fast fibres getting faster. So fibres getting faster as in, you know, kind of type one on type 2a type 2x5 is a getting faster. It's not associated with fibres type shifting in any way,

shape or form. We don't really know much more about it. Other than heavy strength training doesn't make it happen and fast movement training doesn't make it happen. So really, this is identical in in nature as far as these strength and glissing coaches concerned as a motif in it firing rates. Because it's muscle specific, it's not movement specific and it requires a fast movement speed in order to generate. So it pairs perfectly with everything that we've just been talking about.

Yeah, you don't need to do anything extra. Nothing extra on top of this. So really, when we kind of start to break this stuff down, we can see that there's a category of things that are going to be considered for coordination improvements and antagonist cultivation reductions. That's one category. There's the motuno crewman category which is separate way of training for that particular action. And then the final category then is the motuno firing frequency changes and the muscle

firing shortening velocity changes. So you can see that the training considerations separated into these three separate categories. Even though we've got five total

adaptations, we've only got three categories of things to think about. And then finally,

something that you've been mentioning as we've been going through, there are some potential negatives of heavy strength training. There are two that I would highlight. I mean, you can kind of get granular with this stuff. But the two that I would highlight will be the fiber type shifting from X to A. So type 2X type 2A, which makes individual muscle fibers slower. Quite a lot slower.

“I think this is the thing that people don't realize. When I sort of say they go, oh, well, the”

type the change from type 2X type 2A is not big. I might know it's huge. It's really really big. So you might have a fiber that's like capable of shortening at six fiber lengths per second. And you bust it down to four fiber lengths per second. That's a lot. That's a really big shift. You know, that's massive drop off of the top end of your movement velocity capacity. And then secondly, there's this kind of effect of adding mass where you don't need it. So

like you pointed out earlier, intelligent heavy strength training that targets the muscles you're going to use in the sport is fantastic. Starting to add mass in places where you're not going to use it, that's not great, especially if you're moving really fast. So if you've got athletes who are doing, you know, running jumps or if they're sprinting, we do not want to be adding mass in distal segments aggressively because you start doing that. They're going to start getting slower.

And there's some really nice data which we will go through if I have future episode. Well, we talk about how if you add too much quad muscle mass to a sprint to even over a couple of months period, they will get slower. You know, so in that the same thing applies to the calf muscle complex, you start adding too much calf muscle mass. This is one of the reasons one of the reasons there's other reasons as well. But one of the reasons I'm really not a fan of

doing too much calf work even if it's, you know, kind of heavy strength training or isometrics, for the calves, for sprinters, I'd be much happier just doing the drop jumps and kind of working in that respect. I don't like adding mass to the calves because if you think about it, imagine trying to run with heavy boots on because that's the equivalent. It's like it doesn't work. You've got

every time you get the end of the gate cycle. And that is costly and it slows you down and it's not really very effective for sprinting. So yeah, the two things I would say, the fiber-type shifting and adding muscle mass in create places. So before I hand over to you on this one, Rob, just want to kind of finish by saying, obviously, we know that fiber-type shifting happens through calcium arm rate activity. So any calcium arm accumulation is going to cause the fiber-type shifting.

So that straightaway tells us what we can be thinking of doing in the workout for avoiding triggering that particular adoption, whatever we're maybe doing. And then secondly, obviously,

exercise selection is going to be critical for making sure that we focus on muscle mass more

“approximately rather than more distance. So can you talk to that a little bit with some example?”

Yeah, I mean, especially in the fiber-type shifting is one that is really so easy to avoid, but you see people program a lot in ways that are going to make it worse. So if you're going too close to failure, too failure, things like that, you see all the time people programming off-season, you know, quote unquote, "I've productivity blocks," where they do special methods, drops, sets, rest pauses, things like that. Have the time they'll exclude any jump work

and speed work. And all of a sudden you want up in a situation where you're getting like significantly slower. And a lot of times, you know, like you're just saying, if you're putting muscle mass on the wrong places, if you're just trying to kind of, you know, have has a really put muscle mass

on everywhere, you know, the way you would need to if you were a bodybuilder, that is not really

going to be great for your performance. So you start adding muscle, you don't need it. You start making that slower. I'm not going to be a good thing. But yeah, if you just avoid going to failure, if you just avoid any kind of silly, like, finisher and advanced techniques that you might usually use when you're trying to add muscle mass and you'll really mitigate that quite a bit. I'm going to have you starting training. You still might get a little bit of it.

But certainly no, or near as much of you leave a few reps and reserve, you know, use clusters,

“use VVT, use those things we mentioned. Honestly, it's not dissimilar to the way you would go”

about your breathing coordination. You're just kind of stay away from all the silly things that are going to give you that negative adaptation that you might not want.

Totally. Absolutely. So I think the literature shows that if we're doing moderate,

heavy loads, sort of eight, tens, then really two reps and reserve, we can pretty much avoid that calcium arm rate of T. So I imagine if we're doing heavy loads, one or two reps is definitely far enough. So yeah, I think as you pointed out, it's very easy to not trigger this adaption. If you just maintain discipline of keeping the reps and reserve in the right place, obviously, if we start to drift into training to failure, we're probably going to end up with some fire

attack shifting. It's also easy to measure as well. So it's like if you have an athlete who's constantly maybe overshooting a little bit, even though you give them a certain amount of reps and reserve, and then you notice through the weeks that their jump lights are going down, their speed, sprint speeds going down, things like that. Well, then automatically, you can know you're probably running into that problem and you can just make sure they're back off a little bit.

Also, an easy one to address unless you've ran it out, super long, and then it might take a little longer. Yeah, totally. I mean, we will again talk about the detraining and reversal of various adaptions in the future, but yeah, fiber-type shifting is pretty cool in the sense that it does go in both directions relatively quickly. So, as you point out, if we do find that we've made a mistake with the programming, we can just correct it and hopefully, four, five, six weeks later,

we should have largely washed that problem back out again. So, yeah, and then, of course, highlighting what you said there about, you know, not just doing bodybuilding programs, I'm expecting

“it transferred to athletic poems. I am seeing a lot more, I think it's because some of the,”

some of the influences, they've kind of got their high-purchary training programs, they're now trying to market them to athletes. That's really disingenuous. You know, they're there's not the same thing, you know, the training program for a bodybuilder, you know, yes, you know, on a muscle-by-muscle basis, it is going to look pretty much the same, like you've pointed out last time. If you're training, and lastly, to improve muscle size,

and you know that that increase in muscle size will improve poems in this board. Yes, it will look pretty much the same as a really good bodybuilding program designed around kind of what Jake and I would call silver era principles, but physiologies the same answer. But equally, if the bodybuilding program, the generic template includes a whole bunch of carf exercises. Yeah, well, a lot of a lot of carf and a lot of quad, which to be there, you know,

sort of does tend to creep into many bodybuilding programs. And I'm like, "That is not going to work for my sprint, you know, my sprinting needs to stay away from that stuff and be focused on the hip. I want extra glute stuff. I want extra hip place." I mean, that's another point. I mean, you know, not just about what is in the program from some of those bodybuilding, I kind of online templates. You know, there won't be much hip flexoring there at all.

So yeah, usually then, I'm going to need a ton of hip flexor work to get my sprinter to the

But ultimately, you know, it's something that won't be an A bodybuilding program. So it's really,

“really disingenuous to say that. Well, yes, you know, here's my bodybuilding program that I use”

for hypertrophy clients. We yes, and it'll work perfectly for you, you know, who want to do, you know, some kind of athletic performance. Because it's they are different things, even though the hypertrophy sections for each muscle is going to be sort of very, very similar. If not the same,

“the selection of muscles is going to be very different. You know, so that's going to work.”

I'm saying, and then, of course, I always been saying, you know, we are going to always want to be

reps and reserve on the exercises for athletic training. If our athlete needs to move quickly, you can't just be smashing out sets to failure all the time and expect to keep all of your type to x fibers. That's not going to happen, as soon as you get that calcium ion accumulation in the fiber, it triggers it to switch over to a type to a fiber. So that is definitely something that won't work either. So, yeah, so just in defense of, because I know last time we kind of went,

you know, sort of really hard to one in one direction saying, look, you know, if an athletic training program is trying to produce hypertrophy, then it will look very similar to a bodybuilding training program, as long as that bodybuilding training program is set up correctly. Now we're kind of just like tempering that. I said, look, you're going to be aware that there's

“stuff in general. It's certainly going to be identical. Cool. I think that was a great summary of”

speed. Adoptions hopefully illustrated by the examples that you've given there, Robster. And you want to mention before we finish today's episode. I know, I think we're good for us.

Fantastic. As always, thanks guys for listening. Please do give us feedback on Instagram,

both on Instagram so you can tell us what you think and we will be back for another episode next time.